DocuSign has a long history of customer-centric innovation – starting with eSignature development in 2003 by our Founder Tom Gonser. Our concept is simple – eliminate paper from business and make it so that anyone can DocuSign anything, anytime, anywhere, on any device. Securely.

Pen and paper has had a long reign –and as such it was familiar and widely accepted by everyone. To help users make the transition to a digital world, Tom and DocuSign’s Product Development Team integrated familiar elements into the digital experience – like Stick-eTabs™ that show signers where they need to provide information, complete fields, initial and sign to complete documents.

This philosophy around familiarity, ease of use and simplicity in design continue today. At DocuSign, we measure our success by our customers’ success. Our company and products continuously evolve with customer feedback. We leverage focus groups, usability studies, A/B testing and other tools to make ongoing improvements. Our current user interface includes design elements from as far back as 2003 – like those Stick-eTabs™ – along with innovations up through today including PowerForms™, templates to expedite document preparation, bulk recipient sending to accelerate repeatable processes among a large numbers of signers, and more. Many of these innovations we see across the eSignature landscape.

Design elements that have recently been questioned by HelloSign are part of current A/B testing displayed to a small subset of users as part of a usability test in our web application; these experimental elements are not part of the core DocuSign product. The inspiration for these design elements date back to the DocuSign mobile app available in Beta testing and then production in early 2013. They were designed to focus users on the top actions they complete within the DocuSign app: Sign a document, Get signatures from others on documents, and a combination of the two where the user and others need to DocuSign to complete a transaction. Based on favorable user feedback of our mobile app, we are testing these same changes within our web application.

We applaud all within the industry that share our passion for customer-driven innovation and user-centric design. As the industry leader, we expect others will take note of our innovations and build upon them to advance the industry for the betterment of our customers and their success.